


Day Six: Light/Darkness

by rizahawkaye



Series: Royai Week 2017 [6]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst, F/M, Forgiveness, Guilt, Kindness, Love, Sad, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-11
Updated: 2017-06-11
Packaged: 2018-11-12 17:39:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11166792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rizahawkaye/pseuds/rizahawkaye
Summary: Roy was sure that one day darkness would swallow her whole.





	Day Six: Light/Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, I worked on this a lot today. Like started and finished today,,,so be nice.

Roy was sure that one day darkness would swallow her whole. He watched as it tried, and he watched as she knelt before it. His chest ached when he laid eyes on her tired form, dusted with dirt and sagged down by the ink nestled into her back. Sagged down by the death that drenched his hands. Her eyes were cold, hard, and he stood in his place with his hands in fists and cursed himself for mingling with her. He watched those eyes widen, her lips pull down into a frown, and she never smiled anymore. The faded sounds of gunshots and the red blood turned brown against the sands had made sure of that. He had made sure of that, he thought.

Roy often thought back to summers at his master’s home when she’d be back from months of study. Her autumns, winters, and springs were occupied by a boarding school that her father shipped her to so he could neglect parenting and focus his papers and books. As hard as Berthold Hawkeye tried, however, he was never able to rid his house of her for the warmest time of the year. Roy was grateful for that because it meant he wouldn’t spend months studying alone and in silence. Her presence next to him on the porch, or couch, or floor was enough to fill his body with the fire he needed to continue on to the next page in one of his master’s decrepit alchemy books.

She was a quiet girl, though. Words were rarely spoken between the two of them. Besides her father, he didn’t know of her family. He wasn’t sure if she had a favorite book or color, and he knew better than to ask. Sometimes he’d notice her flinch when he shifted positions next to her and so he adopted movements she’d be able to predict: slow tilts of his foot before moving his leg, a small raise of his elbow before pulling his arm up. He didn’t want to scare her away. She had a light that trickled out from behind her eyes and into his whenever she looked at him. She had a curiosity that he could feel bearing into him when she peeked over his shoulder at texts she didn’t understand. He asked her one day if she was interested in the science of alchemy. She winced at the question and her reply had been a soft toss of her head from left to right. He didn’t press, didn’t ask why for fear that she would leave him outside under the beat of the sun by himself.

Roy wasn’t surprised when she maintained her light in the face of her father’s leave. Roy wasn’t surprised that she didn’t bear a grudge against him for abandoning her for the academy, although he detested the choice himself. She blessed him with small smiles and gentle words at the foot of her father’s grave in a such a Riza Hawkeye way, he thought. Pressing her kindness into him with giggles and making him think that maybe she could be the girl he came home to. He was wrong, though, and the warmth that crept into his chest was wiped away by the tip of her tattoo peering at him from the nape of her neck. "Mr. Mustang,” she said, and it was the first time he’d heard the dark drip into her voice. “That dream…can I trust you with my back so that I can help it come true?"

"Mr. Mustang” was what she called him until his fingers found her hair and his tongue parted her lips. He traced the array he'd been agonizing over and she sighed into him as he gripped her breast. He was so unashamed of taking her in his late master's living room, of checking every whimper of "Roy" into his memory. But his master had made an alchemy text out of his own daughter and Roy thought it best to wipe respect off the map of his relationship with Berthold Hawkeye.

"Mr. Mustang," she said, dropping her blouse to lay bear the sins of her father. She looked broken, tasted like the animosity he felt bubbling in his gut.

"Roy," she moaned, her palms pressing her light into his chest. She felt like home, sounded like the beat of his heart.

He wasn't prepared for the screams that pierced the silence when he mutilated her. He'd heard her scream only once before when he was young, when she was still a child. His heart had fumbled at the sound, and he sprang from his perch on the steps of the stairs where he’d been studying. He scrambled around for her, searching with a nervous sweat making a home on his brow. He found her lying on the ground beneath a tree, cradling her bleeding head in her hands, and he was quick to whip his shirt off and press it gently to her wound. She'd curled her hand over his and whispered thanks at him.

"You have to be careful," he told her.

"I was trying to return a baby bird to its nest," she responded. She wound an arm around him and let him lead her to the porch steps where he finished wiping blood from her temple. "The head bleeds a lot even when the injury isn't severe," she told him. He nodded at her but continued dabbing at the tender flesh.

"Did you do it?" He asked. "Did you return the bird?"

"I didn't," she said. “It died when I fell and so I left it under the tree.”

Roy watched her form quiver as she buried the baby bird that evening, under the light of sunset. It wouldn’t be the last time he caught her scooping dirt over a corpse. It wouldn’t be the last time he’d be rendered breathless by the nature of this girl who has every right to hate, but doesn’t. Riza Hawkeye doesn’t hate, and Roy thinks that somehow makes all he’s done worse. He wishes he could be as she is, he wishes she could share her light with him instead of feeding off the darkness he wears like the military jacket that encapsulates his body.

“It’s for an Ishvalan child. His body was abandoned on the side of the road,” is what she said to him. Riza Hawkeye, the woman who doesn’t hate. Roy watches her writhe under the weight of what she'd given him.

She found her way into his office some time later. She spoke to him in a tone that was very much not like the Riza Hawkeye he knew, and he thought that this may be his punishment. He’d immerse himself in her, he’d be forced to meet someone new; a distorted version of a girl he’d admired more than the alchemy she’d awarded him. He stood to her and wondered when he'd fallen so hard. Slowly, his weakness morphed into her. He couldn’t tell if it was born from his guilt, or from the way she sewed his heart to hers, but he was so painfully aware of it. He kept himself two steps ahead of her at all times, where he belonged on their collective journey, though he was constantly stealing glances at her from over his shoulder. “Colonel” and “Lieutenant” abruptly replaced “Roy” and “Riza” and Roy was content with this torture. He assigned to her his back, and she accepted his flesh like it were her burden to bear.

Roy no longer had the luxury of thinking back to the past. The woman, his Lieutenant, was not a Riza Hawkeye he was allowed to be intimate with. Thoughts of sticky summers reading books, of amiable company, of the way her hips tipped into his on her old couch were not permitted between the two of them. They had secrets to carry, they had new lives to live that didn’t involve the light that once passed from her eyes to his. Still, Roy caught glimpses of the Riza he’d been enthralled with before he demolished her: in her voice when she chastised him, in the compassion she shared with the Elric brothers. Relief was a welcome guest when she’d smile, because he’d think that maybe he hadn’t wiped her clean. Maybe, because she’s Riza Hawkeye and Riza Hawkeye does’t hate, she’d somehow kept a sliver of her light. He likes to think so.

He’s drunk when he tells her, when he says through the phone, “The funeral.”

“What?” She asks. “It isn’t safe for you to call me like this, sir.”

“That’s when I knew I loved you,” he practically slurs into the mic. He hears her small gasp, then the receiver clicks off. He tries her again, and she picks up but answers with a taught, “Go home, sir, you’re drunk."

"I'm sorry,” he tells her. "I wish I had known better. I wish I had left you alone.”

"Roy, not now,” she pleads. Nostalgic, he thinks.

"If I could take it all back I would.” He hears her sharp inhale through the line before he says, "I took something from you that I can never give back.” The receiver clicks off again, and he doesn’t dial a third time. He leans against the phone booth and catches his face in his hands. "Do you blame me?" He asks. "Do you blame me?”

Of course she doesn’t, he knows. If there was no more light left in Riza Hawkeye then surely the world would have frozen over. Surely Roy would be dead, surely her finger would have slipped and he’d catch her bullet with his head. When she lay in front of him, her life seeping out of a wound in her neck, Roy saw the light. It was draining from her face so slow, so devastatingly slow, so agonizingly slow that he thought he was draining with it but it was there. Her light was there and he had to save it and so he trusted her, he did the only thing he could think of in the moment because she had trusted him and he owed her this much and more.

“You never took a thing from me,” is what she would say to him later, when her wound had been covered by a thin layer of scar tissue but the ghost of it still coated his eyes. “You never took a thing from me, sir, and I never wish you had left me alone.” It was such a comment, such a fleeting moment that Roy had reeled and wondered if he’d really heard it at all. He stopped, the tip of his pen waiting for him to finish his signature, and he sat back in his seat and eyed her without a word because people were around and he was not supposed to have words for her. So instead, he watched her shuffle around the office with stacks of papers in hand and he thought that she was stronger than him.

He was sure that he’d underestimated Riza Hawkeye’s resilience, her altruism, when he assumed she would be corrupted by a darkness only he thought he had. “You’re a good man, sir,” was all that she said to him for the rest of that day, and he drank the words in like they were his lifeblood. Light or dark doesn’t matter to Riza Hawkeye, to Riza Hawkeye there is only grey, and that’s enough for Roy.

So he keeps pushing forward.


End file.
